Stanford looks to leverage GPU power

Stanford's Graphics Lab has released a beta version of its BrookGPU project, which aims to demonstrate general purpose programming on graphics processors. The group aims to harness GPU power to accelerate image processing, molecular dynamics calculations, ray tracing, and linear algebra, among other applications.

ATI's R3x0-based All-in-Wonder products already leverage GPU resources to accelerate MPEG encoding and video filtering, and S3 has expressed an interest in using its DeltaChrome graphics chip to accelerate Photoshop filters. Before long, GPUs may even be able to lend a hand crunching Folding@Home work units, which could make that next graphics card upgrade just a little bit easier to justify.